SALT IN OUR BLOOD - a book, a saga in making

I just finished reading a book by Michele Ann Eder - a fisherman's wife from Newport, Oregon. This is a sort of log-book extending over some 3 years of her and her family life, written from a point of view of a wife of a commercial fisherman, a skipper-owner. Bob Eder's and his two sons' boats were fishing with crab and fish pots. This is one of the more dangerous fishing methods, because the pots are heavy and stored on the deck, which willy-nilly rises the vessel's centre of gravity, thus reducing stability. The book is a saga of wife's and mother's love, constant worrying, doing shore-service chores, and, tragically so, of mourning. Michele and Bob lost their elder son to the ocean, when his boat capsized drowning Ben and three other crew members.
Salt in our Blood is an unusual and admirable book, which draws the reader into a fishing family, to a degree that eventually one feels himself as its friend.

INTEGRITY IN SCIENCE

During the few first days of December 2011, I read two news items of interest to fishery science. Item 1: A discovery of dangerous virus in farmed salmon by a Canadian scientist has been depressed by her government bosses for ten years, and only now revealed. Item 2: NOAA, which is the U.S. Administration among other things in charge  of fisheries, just published its new policy regarding integrity in science. Its scientists may now publish their findings in general media and in peer-reviewed scientific journals, they may even talk to the media. All this without undue pressure and, of course, provided that they and not the administration are responsible for the fairness and accuracy of their statements. Etc., etc.

Interesting, what had been the situation at NOAA science, before the new policy was published? Hope, not as in Canada...

CLIMATE MIGRANTS

However late, the research report published recently in Current Biology journal by Dr. Steve Simpson from Bristol University and 7 others (Continental Shelf-Wide Response of a Fish Assemblage to Rapid Warming of the Sea) is throwing more light on how the Nature stirred up the wrangling over mackerel quota between the EU and Norway and Iceland and the Faeroes. Evidently, the warming of the NE Atlantic Ocean during several decades has been accompanied by a shift in the composition of commercial fish populations.

It appears that the majority of fishes common in the area are affected by the warming. Thus, mullet, hake, grey gurnard, red gurnard, John Dory, lemon sole, dab, and hake have become more abundant in the now warmer waters surrounding Great Britain. These warmer-water species are smaller, living shorter, growing faster, and hence less prone to overfishing. The authors, who have analyzed trawl data covering some 100 million fish, even assume that UK waters may become more productive as climate change keeps bringing new species in from the south. They've also observed that the number of species that increased with the warming was 3 times the number of declining species.

On the other hand, however, the populations of historically most popular but cold-waters preferring cod and haddock, as well as pollock and whiting, may be dwindling in UK waters, much of them has migrated northwards. Also in the NW Atlantic the mackerel normally found in waters from Cape Hatteras to Newfoundland, shifted about 250 km northwards and 50 km eastwards and into shallower 5 deg.C waters, their preferred temperature range, perhaps also due to shifts in plankton concentrations.

In view of these ocean dynamics, the quarrel about national shares of the mackerel TAC seems to me a bit anachronistic. No doubt, the shares had been set before mackerel spread in Iceland's and Faeroese waters. Such changes don't go away, just because Europe's fishery managers prefer to stick to their inertia. It seems logical that the management rather follows the migrational pattern of the various fish species and their stocks, and readjusts national shares accordingly. It is politically and logically unreasonable to request the Faroese and the Icelanders to observe their former small shares in the mackerel TAC, when the formerly rare mackerel has become so abundant on their own national fishing grounds.

Shouldn't the European fishery management establishment start adapting its measures to the ongoing changes in the composition of fishing stocks in the EU-managed areas?

The conservation bluff of individual quota management

A group of American scientists were asked to evaluate the effect of catch shares (another name for ITQs - individual tradable quotas) in those fisheries

where catch shares had been applied. They found some benefits, but their main finding, IMO, was that the catch shares have had no effect on fish biomass. This means that the number one claim of catch shares promoters that they represent a tool for fish stocks conservation/sustainability, etc., doesn't hold water. Characteristically, and unfortunately, the social persecussions of the quota system were totally absent from the analysis.

BTW, I posted today the abstract and reference to this report on the FISHFOLK discussion list, as well as link to the whole article. For those interested, but without access to FISHFOLK, ask me for the link at benyami@actcom.net.il, or through the my Facebook page.     MB-Y  

 

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Hixon's 10 Commandments

Some 5 years ago, Mark Hixon from the Univ. of Oregon, published an article presenting 10 Commandments for fishery scientists ans managers. Here they are, abridged:
1 - Entire ecosystem management should replace single-species management.
2 -  Question every assumption, including, e.g., the (flawed) traditional fishery goal of "maximum sustainable yield". 3 -  Maintain an "old growth" structure in fish populations, since big, old fish, susceptible  to overfishing, are the best spawners. 3 - Maintain  management boundaries so that they match natural boundaries and the spatial structure of fish stocks in the sea. 4 - Monitor and maintain fish habitats and (5 - )  resilient ecosystems able to withstand occasional shocks. 6 - Identify and maintain critical food-web connections. 7 - Be ready to adapt to ecosystem cyclic changes, including global climate change. 8 - Account for evolutionary changes caused by selective fishing off large, older fish.
9 - Include the actions of humans and their social and economic systems in all ecological equations.
Well, I couldn't find the 10th Commandement, but Amen to these nine. If I had to add mine, it would be: 10 - Remember that you can't manage either fish or climate, all you can manage are (fishing) people.

U.S. Coast Guard - a salute

I read the recent USCG report (1992-2010). The number of fatalities among American fishing people in recent years is about half than during the preceding period.

The USCG saved many hundreds of lives and many vessels. It is probably the only  world's armed force that saves many more lives than it takes. Saving lives and vessels is it's priority task. Salute, USCG, cheers!

ECOSYSTEM APPROACH AND FISHERY MANAGEMENT

The U.S Federal ecosystem management plan explains that inter-species relations and environmental variations must be considered. Single species management simply does not fit those conditions, neither single species TAC nor individual quotas under any name. If the U.S.govt. wants (rightly so) to apply ecosystem management, it must IMO overhaul the whole system.
Bob McDonald from Australia posted yesterday about their fishery-history. His last sentence was: Academic disciplines, only 150 years odd old, have not yet evolved sufficiently to deal with integrated coastal and marine ecology…

There's certainly a problem with the Magnusson Act, which IMO is based on wrong assumptions. I doubt whether it can live with the new ecosystem approach that, if not corrupted by "super-greenies" into "what fishing is doing to the ecosystem, fullstop", and indeed integrates all the environmental and interacting factors into a multifarious and dynamic picture, is the right way to go. More on the subject at my site www.benyami.org.

FISH STOCK SHRINKS? NOT NECESSARILY OVERFISHING

Ben-Yami's Fishing about





The term OVERFISHING is often misused or over-used.

Some years ago, I proposed to forfeit the term overfishing, wherever there's no evidence that a stock of fish shrunk because of fishing.
I suggested the term "impoverishment" for such cases. As we should all know, most fish populations fluctuate with environmental conditions, and with the state of their prey and predators, even without any fishing. They also perform, sometimes multiannual, migrations, when major shift in temperature occurs, as for example, the recent shift of whole mackerel stocks northwards in the NE Atlantic.

Thus, not every apparent impoverishment of local stocks is necessarily overfishing. It may be even not impoverishment at all, just moving out of the area. Survey or a statistical data that indicate that a stock has diminished, therefore, should be supported by additional data and information, leading to the causality of the phenomenon. There are documented opinions, information and actual data indicating that in some areas marine birds and marine mammals, each, consume more fish than related fisheries. Coastal pollution and longshore development may affect or even destroy habitats essential for fish spawning and larval feeding and growth.

SELECTIVITY: have we got it wrong?

Since the dawn of modern fisheries releasing the smaller and younger fish from nets has been management’s dogma. We’ve  been always told to fish only or mainly older, larger fish, and let the younger and smaller fish grow, mature and procreate. The assumption has been that the surviving spawners will produce

huge numbers of eggs and larvae, more than enough to replenish the population. Scientists and managers were prescribing minimum

hook sizes, and minimum mesh sizes for gillnets, trawl codends,

and seine bags.

But, recently more and more scientists appear todissent from

this dogma. What in fact we do, they say, is that by removing the large spawners, who produce large eggs and strong larvae, we

let spawn only the smaller ones, who produce much less and

smaller eggs per spawner and, consequently, smaller, weaker

larvae. Such selection may also lead to fish spawning at lower

age and much lesser size. Remember cod? It would spawn not before the age of 6, when it was three quarters of a meter long.

And now?...  St.Bernard has become a poodle... 

 

Inagine a human population of which every individual, who

exceeds 1.60 m in height is removed, so that only the short ones can procreate. How would such population look after several

generations?